Spring: spiders, strange fruits, blooming spikes

All photos taken in Perth’s Kings Park on Wednesday September 11, 2019.

The “spiders” are orchids, the “fruits” are inedible, the “spikes” are incredible.

In Spring even a cursory walk-through in the bushland section of Kings Park offers a spectacle that is pleasingly hard to believe.  The featured image’s bush is within 30 minutes’ walking distance of the very centre of Perth’s CBD.

If you are a newcomer, hemmed in by the CBD’s manmade “canyons”, you could be unaware that just an easy walk away are a grand estuary and one of the world’s great urban parks.

However, if you look out from atop Kings Park’s scarp – over the water to the CBD – you gain a different, better sense of how and where Perth “sits”.

 

 

Nice as they are, Kings Park’s “big wide screen” aspects – the general spectacle of floral abundance in Spring, and the splendid views from its rim, anytime – are not its most rewarding features.

Altogether more glorious are its myriad “details”, many of which are all too easily walked past, unnoticed.

However, most of them are easily seen, provided you slow down and look, closely, at the ground near your feet.

 

 

 

 

 

The individual flowers on the “UFO” are tiny; the plant is not rare, but to my inexpert eyes it is an Unidentified Flowering Organism.

The Banksia blechnifolia spike below is approximately the size of an adult human’s hand.  In bloom – as it is, or nearly is, here – a spike bears not one flower, but many hundreds, all arrayed in exquisite symmetry. Later, as per the one immediately behind it, this spike’s appearance will become shambolic, shaggy, monochromatic.

 

 

 

Below, I think, is Banksia epica, a species endemic to a small area of south coastal WA. Again, there are many hundreds of flowers on a single spike.

 

 

 

Equally extraordinary in their “fruits” and flowers are some arid zone Eucalypts. As with some Banksias, you can often see all or most of their different stages at one time, on a single individual.

Eucalyptus youngiana – the Large-fruited mallee, or Ooldea mallee, or yarldarlba – grows in inland desert and semi-desert country in WA and SA.